Rise of the Liberators (Terrafide Book 1)

by Ryan Hyatt

  “It was called Operation Park Walk for a reason,” the Colonel said. “It was supposed to be easy. All you had to do was follow orders.”

  “You and I know, Colonel, the orders were not the kind decent Americans, let alone my men, were willing to execute.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” the Colonel said. “Are you saying you and your men weren’t good enough for the job?”

  “No, I’m saying we were too good for it,” Ray said. “You knew Iran was going to be a nasty business all along. The brass couldn’t afford it, so you handpicked my men and me, not for our ‘diverse backgrounds’ and the sake of ‘political correctness,’ but because you needed a human powder keg. You needed the whole thing to blow up in our faces, and it did. Huxley with his financial problems…Kim with his inexperience…Mustafa with his religion…and me with my…self-righteous temperament…somewhere in there you counted on one of us to crack. You expected someone to slip up and mistakenly kill civilians – or not kill them – depending on the order. Either way, we were doomed from the start. You banked on human error so you’d have the justification you needed to replace us with an unyielding computer that follows your command, no matter how awful, because that was the only way the invasion would be cheap and easy enough to turn a profit. The objective was never to rebuild Iran. It’s always been to take the oil and leave the rest of the country to rot. Maybe after a long protracted struggle, a new government might emerge there someday that’ll be democratic – say, ten, twenty or thirty years down the road – but that’s never been your top concern, has it?”

  Ray waited, but the Colonel’s silence was sufficient response. Ray was right, and both men knew it. There was no one else that needed to be convinced.

  “Was it worth it?” Ray said.

  “You tell me, Captain,” the Colonel said. “You’re standing here talking to me, aren’t you, and a richer man for it?”

  “Just curious, Colonel, who do we work for, anyway?” Ray said. “Is it God, the Commander in Chief, the taxpayers, the oil lobby, the military industrial complex? Do you know anymore? I sure as hell don’t.”

  “You work for the same people I work for,” the Colonel said. “You’re as complicit in this as I am, soldier, and that’s as much as either of us needs to know.”

  It was Ray’s turn to be silent.

  “I guess this means I won’t be training any more Liberator pilots,” Ray finally said. “Now what?”

  “You work a bogus desk job at Rocket & Gamble as a military liaison with the Liberator program,” the Colonel said. “You hit the gym in the evenings, barbecue on the weekends, love your wife and watch your daughter grow until she’s big and beautiful and has kids of her own. Most of all, you be thankful for the opportunities this country gave you, and you keep your mouth shut.”

  “And if I don’t?” Ray said.

  “You will, Captain,” the Colonel said. “You see, Ray, after everything is said and done, people aren’t much different than computers. We all follow our orders in the end. Computers just do so a little faster.”

  Ray watched as a lone white shuttle turned onto his mostly-abandoned neighborhood block and slowly approached his home. As his wife and daughter unloaded from the vehicle onto the driveway, Ray sighed with deep and profound relief, conscious of his own breath for the first time in a long time, as if his life had been placed on hold and only at the moment, with the arrival of his family, had it resumed.

  Ray greeted his loved ones with open arms. Regarding the traumatic ordeal Dee and Sara had endured, Ray was pleased to discover that his daughter, at least, seemed undisturbed.

  “Guess what, Daddy?” Sara proclaimed gleefully, “I saw Chicken Man!”

  “Oh, baby, I’m so glad … you’re home safe,” Ray said, and he kissed Sara’s forehead and peered into her eyes, which months after surgery began to reflect a deeper, purer gray than his own.

  A child is able to demonstrate amazing resilience recovering from a horrific experience when adults who experience the same often struggle to cope, Ray thought, and this truth about life’s terrors was one which the father soon realized applied as much to his daughter as himself.

  Within a week the captain was back on the clock, working at Rocket & Gamble in the underground bunker below the old Indigenous plant. He occupied a small windowless office, technically an archive area, surrounded by rows of nice, organized and antiquated filing cabinets, filled with paperwork from a bygone Cold War era, or so he was told. The paperwork might have been obsolete, but the Cold War seemed like it was heating up, rebranded as the Oil Wars.

  Ray’s work area was referred to as the “basement” by Rocket & Gamble staff, but to Ray it was more like a dungeon. He got used to it. There was little required of him there. Even so, his frustration didn’t quell. In many ways, it just festered with time. Even as Ray hit the gym in the evenings and barbecued on weekends, loved Dee and watched Sara grow, all as the Colonel prescribed, he found himself longing for action. His family had all it needed, for Ray was paid well, and his loved ones lived like suburban royalty. Ray’s family had more than their health. The Marine veteran never went a day without being grateful his daughter saw as well as he did, breathed the same air he did, and that in itself made the nightmare of the past year almost seem worthwhile.

  With gas prices at a five-year low, and Americans rejoicing at a mild upswing in the economy, Ray still had some remorse in his heart. He regretted the sacrifice of those who were dead and gone, people like David Kim, already forgotten by the public.

  Shortly after their reunion, Ray and his family took a trip to Los Angeles, where they met Kim’s brother Bruce, eleven, and sister Amy, nine. The Salvatores liked the boy and girl, and so Ray began to take the steps to try to adopt them out of state from the orphanage where they resided. He hired a lawyer to help him with the paperwork, which only grew on his desk with time and never seemed to reach the desired result. Likewise, Ray’s remorse grew, too.

  Ray began to record his travails in a journal. He started with the summer day in 2022 when he was contacted by the Colonel and offered a job. Approximately six months since Iran, Ray was sitting inside his Rocket & Gamble basement office and finishing the entry that would make his journal current, when he sensed someone approaching from down the hall.

  At first Ray half expected Herio Atta to turn the corner and greet him face to face in the doorway, dressed like the other engineers at the facility, in a Polo shirt and slacks, with pistol in hand, ready to finish the Iran business once and for all.

  Instead it was Stephen Humphrey hobbling in with his cane.

  “You followed my advice,” he said. “You kept your humanity throughout the war. I told you that you would be tested, and you were, and you answered the call. I’m proud of you, despite how it’s ended for some of your men.”

  “We did our best,” Ray said, and he vaguely recalled their last conversation at Outer Chowder Steakhouse. “There was a lot of pressure to ‘kill them all and let God sort them out,’ so to speak. It wasn’t always easy to not go crazy out there.”

  “It never is, and it never will be.”

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I’m here to offer you a job, working for the good guys.”

  Ray noticed a welt on Humphrey’s forehead. It started to shift.

  “I already work for the good guys,” he said. “It’s called Team USA.”

  “No, you don’t,” Humphrey said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Humphrey’s eyes closed, and the welt on his forehead opened. It was a third eye. The lips on the creature didn’t move, and the being spoke directly to Ray’s mind.

  I want you to prepare your people for the Awakening.

  “You want me to fight another war?”

  The third eye blinked. The two eyes below it opened and stared vacantly at Ray.

  “What’s in it for me?”

  Immortality possibly, a hero’s death definitely.

  “Sorry, not inter
ested.”

  Then do it for your daughter. Make the world a better place for her.

  “I have life insurance. No matter what, she’s set.”

  Only if life on this planet persists.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Awaken.

  The third eye closed, and Humphrey or this being or whatever it was just stood and stared vacantly at Ray, and waited.

  Ray glanced at his work station, his desk, and his journal. He considered his prospects for the next several decades in his functionless position as a military liaison to Rocket & Gamble.

  He was already bored and loathed his and humanity’s future. Maybe with the help of Humphrey or this being or whatever it was, he’d have a chance to save it.

  “I’m sold,” Ray said. “Now, how do I sign up?”